stream of consciousness updates

This is what I've been doing the past eight months. Trust me, I'm not particularly smart, and I have no problem learning languages. If you can get into college, you can learn a foreign language.

My guru is Khatzumoto at alljapaneseallthetime.com. I'll be updating my blog with tweaks that have worked for me, but in all things, Khaz is the master. That's not to say he's some kind of genius, either. He's clearly a smart guy, but mostly his success seems to come from a few traits that I happen to share:1) pigheaded stubborness2) a love for the sound of a particular foreign language3) an ego big enough to withstand only understanding 10% of what I see/hear

100% OF WINNING IS SHOWING UP. I mean it. That’s all
you have to do. Show up. Be there. And it will take care of itself.
Have you ever noticed that people at the top of their respective fields
are often the most prolific? Do you think this is an accident? Chief,
this is not a coincidence.

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius
will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not;
the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination
alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will
solve the problems of the human race.

To me there are two big reasons and the first has to do with our most
basic fear – the fear of being rejected...from an early age we are programmed to get our rewards
by performing as close to flawlessly as possible all of the time. Our
outcomes become everything.

Having taught undergraduates now for a year, I see this now all the time. Khaz's posts showed me that it's not only OK to fail--it's essental, and it should be my short-term goal. But my students are only concerned with maintaining their fragile egos by only doing things that come easy to them, which isn't their faults. They've been taught by our society that talent is everything. Some people are good writers, and they should be the ones who write; there's no point in trying to get better, because you'll never be as good as they are. It's the subtext to American culture.

This isn't how most East Asian societies bring up their kids. They're taught that if you suck at something, it's your own fault for not working hard enough. I say it's your own fault for not keeping at it and trying new methods until one works. Never give up on something you want to do--but keep working at it and keep refining your method.

This is true for writing, languages, sports--anything. There will always be someone who is physically incapable of becoming accomplished in a particular skill, but this is a much smaller portion of the population than people usually assume. I don't know about purely physical skills, but when it comes to learning languages, the bar for entrance is very low. I mean, do you know how many truly stupid people speak the language you're trying to learn? A lot. How did they learn it? By listening to it countless hours a day for the first few years of their lives.

Adults learn better than children do. Here's why: if you want to teach a 1-year-old how to say "apple," the kid has to learn all kinds of things in addition to that one word. Apples are something you can eat, they're sweet, they're red or green, they are different on the outside and the inside, they shouldn't go on the floor... One top of that, they're called "apples," which is a little hard to say. But if an adult wants to learn how to say "apple" in French, you just tell him it's "pomme" and call it a day. Which is, like, 1% of the time it took the child to get to the same level in English. If you spent the hours and hours a five-year-old has to learn a language, you'd be talking circles around all the five-year-olds.

But most people don't want to spend the time. So in the end, it's a defeatist attitude backed up with laziness. Which is fine, but don't pretend that it has anything to do with intelligence or "talent."

So here's the method in a nutshell:

1. Listen to 10,000 hours of a language. You don't have to actually pay attention the whole time--just have it on in the background.

2. Learn how to pronounce, understand, and write 10,000 sentences in the language. This is how you learn grammar and vocabulary. You aren't memorizing them, but you are reviewing them often using an SRS.

3. Read a lot for pleasure in the language. No metrics here, although 1 million words has been batted around.

4. Enjoy yourself: your brain won't pay attention to what you don't think is worth paying attention to. So find things you like in the language.

I keep a daily log and mark off milestones on a chart. Every day I use a stopwatch to record how much of the language I heard and I use an abacus in the morning to count off how many sentences I put in my SRS. I try to review my SRS often. I carry a book around to read. That's it. No classes--which just slow me down anyway.

So, a free method for learning languages that just takes 1-2 hours a day of active focus and let's you get to proficiency in about a year and a half. Why isn't everyone doing this?

-any print-outs
you collect along the way (save all old versions of your paper as different
files)

Step One: Pre-Writing [About 2-4 Hours Over 1-2 Days]

Skim through the required sources again, very
quickly.If anything comes to mind,
write that down, either in the margins or on a piece of paper.

Type the question into the computer.For example:

Using the Declaration of Angostura and the two Lenin
documents in Blaisdell (227-231, 236-238) as your primary sources, write an
essay contrasting the revolutionary goals of the Latin American and Russian
revolutions. What do the differences tell us about the developments of
the nineteenth century?

Break out the question into smaller questions:

How are the revolutionary goals of the Latin American and
Russian revolutions similar?

How are the revolutionary goals of the Latin American and
Russian revolutions different?

What do the differences tell us about the developments of
the nineteenth century?

Brainstorm about smaller questions that you’ll
also need to answer to answer these questions:

What are the revolutionary goals of the Latin American
revolution?

What are the revolutionary goals of the Russian revolution?

How are the revolutionary goals of the Latin
American and Russian revolutions similar?

How are the revolutionary goals of the Latin
American and Russian revolutions different?

What do the differences tell us about the
developments of the nineteenth century?

Using the required sources, brainstorm answers to
these questions.

Print out your answers, and either move to a new
location or take a five minute break and come back.With a pencil, put a check mark next to
the items that you think are good, and write notes by the ones you think
could be better.Use arrows to move
items around that should be under different headings, and cross out items
that you don’t like.

Put this piece of paper aside.Get up and stretch or take a short
break.Look at the prompt again,
and brainstorm about the big picture.Is there anything you’re missing?Think creatively:

Bolivar:
d. 1830

Russian
Revolution: 1917

What
happened in-between? WWI…Communist Manifesto…(industrialization became a major
force in society)…

Take out the prompt again, and write a one-sentence
answer to it:

Although these revolutions were influenced by many of the
same events of the 19th century, they diverged into dramatically different
paths due to their leaders' different understandings of proper desserttoppings. Lenin's passion for crushed nuts led to a
violent break with the past, while Bolivar's measured preference for caramel
influenced the new Latin American states to maintain the liberal capitalist policies
of

Britain

.

Underline the points in your thesis statement
that you need to prove:

Although these revolutions were
influenced by many of the same events of the 19th century, they diverged
into dramatically different paths due to their leaders' different
understandings of proper desserttoppings.
Lenin's passion for crushed nuts led to a violent break with the past,
while Bolivar's measured preference for caramel influenced the new Latin
American states to maintain the liberal capitalist policies of

Britain

.

In the computer, write your
thesis statement and rephase the underlined points as arguments; place
points that are off-shoots or sub-arguments underneath the larger argument:

Although these revolutions were influenced by
many of the same events of the 19th century, they diverged into dramatically
different paths due to their leaders' different understandings of proper desserttoppings. Lenin's passion
for crushed nuts led to a violent break with the past, while Bolivar's measured
preference for caramel influenced the new Latin American states to maintain the
liberal capitalist policies of

Britain

.

These revolutions were influenced by many of the same events
of the 19th century.

These revolutions diverged into dramatically different paths.

The leaders of these revolutions had different
understandings of proper desserttoppings.

Lenin had a passion for crushed nuts.

This led to a violent break with the past.

Bolivar had a measured preference for caramel.

This influenced the new Latin American states to maintain
the liberal capitalist policies of

Britain

.

Search through your main sources for evidence to
support each statement.Include
your own notes and thoughts, as well as quotations and paraphrases of the
texts.Don’t stop to make anything
pretty—just do as much work as is necessary to make it something you’ll
still understand tomorrow.

STOP
FOR TODAY.Reward yourself for doing a
good job, and go do something you enjoy.

Step Two: Writing[About 2-4 Hours Over 1-2 Days]

* (for papers over 10 pages,
add more days here)

Now you’re going to actually
write the paper.Using the sub-arguments
and evidence you have, write a paragraph for each point you want to make.Sentences should contain a
topic sentence that introduces the main idea; ideally a person should be able
to read only the topic sentences of your paper to get a summary of your
ideas. The other sentences in the paragraph should provide evidence,
examples, or futher explanation for your topic sentence, but should not introduce
major new ideas--for that, you'll need another paragraph.

Most paragraphs in an essay have a three-part
structure—introduction, body, and conclusion. You can see this structure in
paragraphs whether they are narrating, describing, comparing, contrasting, or
analyzing information. Each part of the paragraph plays an important role in
communicating your meaning to your reader.

Introduction: the first section of a paragraph; should include the
topic sentence and any other sentences at the beginning of the paragraph that
give background information or provide a transition.

Body: follows the introduction; discusses the controlling
idea, using facts, arguments, analysis, examples, and other information.

Conclusion: the final section; summarizes the connections
between the information discussed in the body of the paragraph and the
paragraph’s controlling idea.

The following paragraph illustrates this
pattern of organization. In this paragraph the topic sentence and concluding
sentence (CAPITALIZED) both help the reader keep the paragraph’s main point in
mind.

SCIENTISTS HAVE LEARNED TO
SUPPLEMENT THE SENSE OF SIGHT IN NUMEROUS WAYS. In front of the tiny pupil of
the eye they put, on
Mount Palomar, a great monocle 200 inches in diameter, and with it see 2000 times
farther into the depths of space. Or
they look through a small pair of lenses arranged as a
microscope into a drop of water or blood, and magnify by as much as 2000
diameters the living creatures there, many of which are among man’s most
dangerous enemies. Or,
if we want to see distant happenings on earth, they use some of the previously wasted electromagnetic
waves to carry television images which they re-create as light by whipping tiny
crystals on a screen with electrons in a vacuum. Or they can bring happenings of long
ago and far away as colored motion pictures, by arranging silver atoms and
color-absorbing molecules to force light waves into the patterns of original
reality. Or if we want
to see into the center of a steel casting or the chest of an injured child, they send the information on a beam
of penetrating short-wave X rays, and then convert it back into images we can
see on a screen or photograph. THUS ALMOST EVERY TYPE OF ELECTROMAGNETIC
RADIATION YET DISCOVERED HAS BEEN USED TO EXTEND OUR SENSE OF SIGHT IN SOME
WAY.
--George Harrison, “Faith and the Scientist”

Focus on writing one paragraph at a time. You can
work on them out of order.Don’t
worry if it isn’t the best writing you’ve ever done—just get the sentences
down on paper.

Write the conclusion.

Write the introduction.

STOP FOR TODAY.Reward yourself for doing a good job, and go
do something you enjoy.

Step Two: Editing [About 2-4 Hours Over 1-2 Days]

Editing for Content

Print
out what you did yesterday and check the argument:

-- Underline your thesis. Does
it make a specific claim? (It should.)

-- Underline the main
sub-arguments that you use to support your thesis. Are they enough (do
you need more)? Are they all necessary (can one be taken out)? Do they
prove your thesis?

-- Underline every place you
make a claim that needs evidence.

-- Now, circle the places
where you use evidencefrom primary sources to prove your
claims. Are there any major sub-arguments or minor claims where no
evidence is provided?

-- But brackets [ ] every
place you provided a counter-argument to a claim. For those where
you did not add a counter-argument, try to think of how someone could poke
holes in your claim and your evidence. Either tighten up the phrasing so
that it is irrefutable or admit that a counter-argument exists in your
paper. Make sure you refute each counter-argument.(If the point doesn’t need this, that’s
fine—just check to make sure.)

2.Sanity Check

--Look again at the question
prompt.Did you answer everything or is
something left out? Did you stray from the question?

-- Look back over your notes
and skim the documents again.Does
anything seem important to you that you left out?

2.Editing for Style

Try
these techniques on your print-out, making notes in the margins whenever you
find an error.

-- Carefully
and slowly read your writing out loud.

--
Read your writing, sentence by sentence, from the last sentence to the first
sentence. This technique interrupts the logical flow of the prose and neutralizes
any impression of correctness arising from your knowledge of what you meant to
say.

Make
any changes in the soft copy of your document.

3.Proofreading

--
Use your dictionary to check any words of which you are unsure, and to check
for correct prepositions, verb tenses, and irregular forms.

--Get
a friend who is a good writer to check over the paper.

Make
any changes in the soft copy of your document.

Getting the paper ready for your teacher.

--
Check the prompt and the syllabus. Is there any specific information about how
the paper should look? Did you write the correct amount of pages, use the right
font and margins?

--
Add a title, page numbers, your name, etc., according to the requirements.

--
Print out, upload, or email the paper at least an hour before you have to leave
to turn it in.This way, you can get
help if there’s a technical problem.

Want to take your writing to the next level? This is one of the best
websites on how to write college papers. In addition to their great
guides to style, check out their resources on how to recognize logical
fallacies, on dealing with writing anxiety, and on succeeding in
history courses:

A student asked to meet me about his paper today. I only have the few minutes after the lecture before I dash off campus, so I said I could meet him before. Before, of course, is valuable study time for me: 7-9:30 am, when I get my reading done for another class -- after the harrowing experience of forcing myself up at 5:30 to beat traffic and get to school on time.

He just laughed at the idea. "I'm not a morning person," he said.

I just gave him that look everyone used to give me, which I used to think was understanding.

I'm looking at 70 hours of work starting after Labor Day. I'm nervous about staying sane but also about how I'll do as a TA. Not to mention my anxiety about my comps, after the debacle of last semester. So I'm easing into my new schedule starting today. I got up early and went out to study. It's amazing how effective I can be when I feel I have all the time in the world. I only hope I can keep that focus over the next year.

One of my fellow TAs sent out her syllabus for the rest of us to look at. We have to do a syllabus? This is news to me.

It was intimidating--the sort of "be in your seats on time with textual evidence from the readings ready for your comments" stuff. I just can't take the class THAT seriously--or to that intense of a level. I guess I'm still working out what my role is, and what kind of teacher I want to be.

Well next week is reading teaching books week. This week I'm just freaking out about Japanese comps. That's enough.